


The Upbringing of Elizabeth Lutece

by Solshine



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Spoilers for the ending, competent parenting, timeline weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-28 06:17:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7628332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solshine/pseuds/Solshine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is just one way this doesn't end up as a paradox. As she stands in the water finishing the deed and options start to wink out of existence, Elizabeth starts to remember the only life left to her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Upbringing of Elizabeth Lutece

The Luteces raised her. 

It’s the only universe left that makes sense, that lets her be here, drowning her father in a universe free from his darker influences. As he struggles and chokes under the water, as his life and the universes around her gutter like candles, the memories fight in her head, like arm wrestling, wavering at the middle and pushing against each other with a pressure that makes her vision swim.

 

\---

 

The lab was nearly always humming or buzzing with some machine or experiment or other. Elizabeth could hear the sound from her room, through the hole in the Luteces’ bedroom floor they’d torn for the dimensional machine. The lab noises put her to sleep at night, kept her company like a lullaby.

(There was debate at first between Robert and Rosalind about whether to call her Anna or Elizabeth. How much would it matter? She would know both her names someday. And Anna is perhaps the truer of the two. But it is Elizabeth who will stand in a river in between universes someday, so Elizabeth she must be.)

She played her girlhood games under the lab tables and scrawled childish pictures on the backs of scrapped diagram drafts. She invented solitary hopscotch games over the great snakelike electric cables winding through the house. The Luteces were good guardians when they remembered to be; sometimes they got caught up in their work and seemed to forget they had a little girl in the house to be fed and put to bed and scolded, so Elizabeth learned to do it for herself when she needed. But most times they were kind and conscientious, and always wonderfully interesting. Rosalind taught her baseball. Robert taught her dancing. They both taught her physics and chemistry and philosophy.

That was what she called them, Robert and Rosalind. When she returned from her first day of school (“What could _possibly_ be the advantage of a conventional school?” “Remember, Ros, Comstock raised her in a tower.”) she came with an observation.

“Other children don’t call their parents by their names,” she informed the two of them as they were working in the lab. They were both wearing safety gloves and goggles and aprons, and Rosalind was holding a large vial with a pair of tongs while Robert added something with another pair. At a distance, Elizabeth sat on the piano and watched with interest. She hoped it would blow up.

The thing plopped in—“Too fast!” Rosalind hissed—fizzed a bit, and then settled. The Luteces relaxed. Robert raised his goggles to his forehead.

“That’s because we’re not your parents.”

“Oh,” said Elizabeth. She processed this while Rosalind set down the vial and Robert stripped off his bulky gloves. The danger apparently having passed, Elizabeth jumped down from the piano and came over, to peer at the nugget slowly starting to dissolve in the solution. She looked up, frowning. “Who are you, then?”

“We are Rosalind—”

“—and Robert Lutece,” they said. “Pleased to meet you,” Robert added, bending down and holding out a hand courteously for a shake. Elizabeth giggled and shook it.

“That’s got forty-five minutes to activate,” said Rosalind before Elizabeth could ask any follow up questions. “Do you want lunch?”

 

\---

 

“Who was my mother? Did you know her?”

Rosalind was playing the piano and Robert was watching a little sliver of light suspended between three pointed copper coils and writing down a series of numbers.

Elizabeth had been reading a very unlikely novel on the floor, leaning on her elbows, her feet kicking in the air. It had lost her attention, though, on a dialogue between the heroine and her mother.

“No, we didn’t,” said Rosalind, not pausing in her rendition of Handel’s _The Harmonious Blacksmith_.

“But she was, by all accounts, a wonderful woman,” added Robert.

“Accounts being limited.”

“But conclusive,” said Robert, frowning over at Rosalind. She made no answer.

“What happened to her?” Elizabeth had come to understand that parents who didn’t raise their own children generally had something Happen to them.

“She died when you were born,” said Rosalind, still looking at her fingers playing. “That’s always true.”

It didn’t seem a strange turn of phrase to Elizabeth, who was growing up hearing truths often spoken of in alwayses or nevers or sometimes. (Once, she had been scolded about playing with the lab equipment. “No working in the lab unsupervised,” Rosalind had said. “Is that always true?” a disappointed Elizabeth had asked, to be rewarded by one of Rosalind’s rare, flickering smiles. “Yes,” Rosalind had answered gravely. “It is a nonconditional event.”)

Elizabeth kicked her feet in the air in thought.

“What about my father?” she asked. “What happened to him?”

That did make Rosalind pause in her playing. “He…”

She didn’t turn around, but it was like she was exchanging a glance with Robert anyway. Elizabeth twisted around to see Robert pinning Rosalind’s back with a look.

“He drowns,” said Robert, after Rosalind started playing again.

“Drowned,” Elizabeth corrected him. She was learning in school that other people did not throw around verb tenses as carelessly as her guardians did.

“Yes,” said Robert.

 

\---

 

He’s not even properly fighting anymore, not really. He’s twitching and jerking with the urgency for breath, and his hands are still closed around her wrists, her hands fisted in his shirt front. But he’s not trying to pull her off him anymore. They’re just wrapped there, holding on painfully tight. Only her wrists, not the wrists of the others, though there are still two more Elizabeths holding him under, strong steady hands, missing pinky fingers.

The water is choppy from his kicking, but it’s very clear and clean (it’s not hard to believe it’s water that could cleanse your soul, wash all its stain away) and she can see his face clearly. Maybe the expression is remorse. Maybe it’s love. Maybe it’s just not wanting to die.

Maybe it’s gratitude.

She hopes it’s gratitude. She is grateful to him, after all, for saving her, for taking care of her. She is glad to think she can do one last thing for him.

Maybe she’s glad. Maybe she’s just sorry to be drowning this man she’s never met.

She feels a tickle of something wet under her nose.

 

\---

 

“We could find the Lady Comstock, or whoever she is here,” Elizabeth heard Robert saying one evening. Elizabeth was meant to be upstairs playing, but had come downstairs to check on the status of her solution sublimating in the lab.

“And do what?” Rosalind responded cooly.

“Introduce them?” Robert suggested. “Hire her out as a governess?” Solution forgotten, Elizabeth stopped behind the corner to listen.

“She doesn’t—”

“—need a governess, I know. And probably the Lady—”

“—isn’t hiring out as a governess. And she’s not the girl’s mother,” Rosalind pointed out. “Not even an approximation of a mother. She’s two whole lives and one and a half aborted timelines away from even being a motherly figure.”

“One and a half?”

“I rounded.”

“The two of them did have a _moment_ in Columbia.”

“Columbia will never happen.”

“You hardly need to tell me.”

“Besides, in five out of seven universes…”

Elizabeth tiptoed away again as the discussion turned to a familiar tracing of causalities and timelines as it had often done on many another subject.

Elizabeth was just glad she wasn’t getting a governess.

 

\---

 

"Where’d you get me from?”

“Another world,” said Robert simply, handing her a plate to dry.

She took it, nodding. “That’s what I thought,” she said. They worked in silence for a minute, the only sound the plunk and splash of plates in the sink and the distant hum of lab equipment. “Is that why I can open tears?” she asked.

“Partially,” said Rosalind, who was answering mail at the table.

“And partially what else?”

“Partially we don’t know,” said Robert.

“Aren’t sure,” Rosalind corrected.

“Aren’t positive,” Robert amended. “There are some possibilities, but they’re very complicated and hard to test.”

“Is that why you took me?” said Elizabeth. “Partially?”

“No, dear,” said Robert. “That’s not why.”

Neither he nor Rosalind said why, and Elizabeth didn’t ask.

 

\---

 

She got better and better at the tears as she got older, but Robert and Rosalind asked her not to look around for other versions of her own life. Rules were like that in the Lutece household—seldom stringent dos or do nots. The two of them just asked.

“Why not?” asked Elizabeth, who until then had not been particularly interested in searching out other versions of herself, which seemed much more boring than discovering other places and times and people.

“We’ll tell you when you’re older,” Robert said, and Elizabeth sighed, disappointed, but let it go. 

“We’ll tell you when you’re older” was something she had heard several times in her life, but unlike most children, she’d been promised a due date in response to her questions of “How much older?”

“Twenty,” Rosalind had said crisply. “And three months.”

Elizabeth could wait until twenty and three months.

 

\---

 

There’s just one other Elizabeth in the river now, holding her hands to his chest. His grip is loosening on her wrists, but she keeps her own grip tight. The blood from her nose has trickled down over her lips. It itches. Her vision is shimmering at the edges, like it’s her being choked of air and not him. She is dizzy. It is hard to stand up. Her pasts mix and blur—Robert counting out a waltz, _one_ two three _one_ two three, in the library of her Columbia tower, his big hands folded around her tiny ones; Songbird, perched on the roof of the Lutece’s house, peering in her window, the rumble of his machinery blending with the hum of the lab. And all the rest, all the Elizabeths both real and ending. 

Causality is a wash. All her lives are happening at once. Her head hurts like her skull is squeezing it, like her brain stem’s been dipped in acid, like skewers through her eyes. Verb tenses are breaking down—not like the way Robert and Rosalind juggled them, but like the decay of a radioactive substance.

She can no longer see Booker’s face through all the static. The last other Elizabeth flickers.

 

\---

 

A week out from twenty and three months, Elizabeth started to get headaches. She mentions them to Rosalind, who had nodded crisply.

“I anticipated this,” she says, but gave no other explanation. She will walk into the lab, and switch on a machine she and Robert constructed a year or so ago, and which was not used since. The buzzing in the lab multiplies by ten, and Elizabeth’s headache went away.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“Just made the house a universal constant,” Rosalind explained, “stabilizing us in the multiverse.” She patted Elizabeth’s shoulder as she passed. “You’ll be fine.”

 

\---

 

She will wake in the night panting as if she is running for her life. She stumbles blearily through the house, not yet awake, but propelled by an unshakable urgency. Robert found her in the bathroom, rummaging for the first aid kit.

“What is it you need?” said Robert. Elizabeth barely acknowledged him.

“Booker,” she gasps, her fumbling hands searching the counters blindly and knocking a basket of towels to the ground. “He’s hurt. I have to find—” Robert places a hand on her shoulder and she blinks fully awake. She paused and then turned toward Robert.

“But I—I’m sorry, I must have been having a dream.”

He smiled kindly. “I’ll tweak the machine. Go back to bed.”

 

\---

 

The machine takes a great deal of energy and does not always work properly. The hum stutters and the sound of screams or explosions would choke Elizabeth’s ears, or she went dizzy with the sudden hallucination of blood spattering her hands, her dress.

“Focus, Elizabeth,” she hears somebody—Robert? Rosalind?—say at the edge of her awareness, but she pulled away from their steadying hands.

She careers through the house, barely able to see in front of her. Booker was following her, shouting, but the Luteces stayed behind.

Who is Booker? She doesn’t know anyone named Booker.

She locked herself in her room so Booker hadn’t been able to interrupt her. She tore off her clothes _they’re covered in blood she’s covered in blood_ and splashes her face with water from the basin to clear her mind _she killed Daisy she killed her Daisy is dead._ It doesn’t help.

She snatched her sewing scissors from the table and chops off her long braid. Ponytail? No, braid, just like always, more practical in a house of open flames and electric fields, easy to pin up into a bun to work in the lab. Rosalind will teach her how to braid her hair when she was small. Taught. Teaches.

Booker is pounding on her door, calling her name.

From downstairs, the hum resumed.

The pounding stopped.

She’d never known a man named Booker.

She put on fresh clothes. Her old ones, she saw now, were clean and bloodless, but she still couldn’t make herself touch them. Robert was waiting outside her bedroom door when she unlocked it.

“You’ve gotten your hair uneven,” he says. He leads her over to a chair and sits her down. He begins to trim.

 

\---

 

None of the tears she opens go right. She hasn’t had a tear disobey her for years, but suddenly they’re opening on freight yards instead of flower gardens, on armories instead of museums, While preparing dinner, she opened a tear to get more butter, and found herself staring at a dead Chinese man tied to a chair, bloodied and beaten, his face almost beyond identification.

She wonders if it was Booker. Then she screams.

Both the Luteces ran in. Robert kneels next to her—she had ended up on the ground somehow—and murmurs reassurance, hands on her shoulders.

“Dies, died, will die. It’s all just a matter of perspective. It’s nothing to be afraid of.” It shouldn’t have helped, but it did. 

Dies, died, will die. She stares at the corpse on the other side of the tear.

“Could you close that, do you think?” said Robert gently. She did.

Dies, died, will die. Is dying. Had died. Will have been dying.

Dead.

 

\---

 

It’s a comfort, she thinks, as his body gives one last twitch and stills, and the last Elizabeth disappears. Not because as a matter of perspective the man in the water is not dead, but because he was always going to die. Elizabeth releases his shirt and he floats to the surface, his eyes still open but seeing nothing. Elizabeth straightens unsteadily and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. Her vision is staticky, fuzzy, drained of color, like looking through a tear, but she can see the red of the blood just fine. It mixes with the water on her wet hand and drips from her fingertips. It drips from her chin too, where she hadn’t caught the dribble earlier, and onto her dress.

She’s covered in blood again, but she doesn’t have any more hair to cut.

Her sense of balance tilts, and she teeters in the water as her headache gives one final pulse ( _dance with me Mr. DeWitt Paris cage bird let’s go to Paris will the circle be unbroken stay with me Booker_ ) and then quiets.

One moment she is alone with the body in the bright sunshine. The next moment she is not. She turns around to see the Luteces standing on the riverbank.

“You raised me,” she says slowly. They both nod. “You remember it?”

“Of course,” says Robert.

“It was just as much reality as any of the other realities you’ve seen,” says Rosalind. “It really happened.”

“It only really happened just now, of course. But nevertheless.”

Elizabeth looks back at the body floating in the water. She’s never met him before. She knows who he was to some other Elizabeth, of course, the way she knows the memories of the Elizabeths who vanished, but they aren’t her memories. He is not hers anymore, just the father she never knew all over again.

“You raised me to kill him?” she says, shuddering a little.

“Not exactly,” says Rosalind.

“We raised you, and then brought you here to kill him,” Robert clarifies.

“Causality is important.”

“You made this decision, and we merely…” A pause. “Took custody of the paradox.”

If Comstock never lived, why would she kill her father who would become Comstock. And round and round it goes.

“It still doesn’t quite work out,” Elizabeth says, still looking at the body. 

“But it does not inherently contradict itself,” Rosalind points out. “You’ve stabilized from a human paradox to a complex multidimensional space-time event.”

“Welcome to the club,” says Robert, smiling.

“We don’t quite work out, either.”

“Was it right?” Elizabeth says. “What I did?” She was so sure a minute ago, when it had been Booker who helped her grow up, who taught her that you should hurt people before they hurt you. Now she doesn’t know.

“it’s hardly ours to make moral judgments,” says Robert.

“Please,” she snaps, looking up. “You never stop discussing the philosophy of your work.”

“Regarding our own actions,” says Rosalind. “Not yours.”

Elizabeth hesitates. “He was a good man.”

“That was sometimes true,” agrees Robert.

“He did terrible things,” Elizabeth says.

“That was sometimes true,” replies Rosalind.

Booker had tried to do the right thing. But then, one could say Comstock had as well. She realizes she’ll probably be answering this question for a very, very long time. She turns away from the corpse at last.

“What do I do now?” she says. Her headache may be gone, but it has left in its place a sad, empty weariness, like the wrung-out feeling after being deeply sick.

“Whatever you like,” says Rosalind.

“You could go to Paris,” Robert suggests. “I hear it’s lovely this time of year.”

“I hear it’s lovely any time of year.”

“Precisely.”

Elizabeth shakes her head. “I think I… I think I just want to go home.”

“There is no more Columbia,” says Rosalind in a tone that’s probably supposed to be gentle.

“It disappeared in any form you’d know it along with Comstock.”

“There _is_ a world where I succeeded in building a floating city without Comstock’s sponsorship,” Rosalind offers. “We could take you there. I might even be expecting me.”

“No,” says Elizabeth. “I want to go _home_.”

Both the Luteces’s faces soften with identical smiles.

“Of course, dear,” says Robert.

Elizabeth wades out of the river without another look at the body of Booker DeWitt. She opens a tear into a room of humming equipment with the ease of pushing aside a lace curtain, and the three of them step through.

The tear closes. The riverside is silent and beautiful, and the bright sun gleams on the water.


End file.
